HOME AGAIN

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 96, 14 July 1927, Page 9

HOME AGAIN

BRITISH AMATEUR CUP BETTER LUCK THIS TIME The British Amateur Cup has safely reached its own shores after a season’s leave of absence in American climes. This was only its second venture outside British shores. Twenty-two years have flown since its first visit to America, when it arrived in positively disreputable shape. That was when it was shipped at the behest of Walter J. Travis, who was not, like Jess Sweetser, last year’s American holder of the Amateur Championship, of American birth, but a naturalised Australian, which served to slightly assuage the grief of the Britons over its protracted absence. The trophy got packed in the container that should have enshrouded St. George’s vase. The cups are quite different in shape and the voyage being rough the silverware became so battered it had to be sent to a foundry on Maiden Lane, where the smiths hammered it out and applied polish in order that St. Andrew’s sportsmen wouid recognise it and not accuse the States” of shipping back a “spurious imitation,” as the proprietary medicine compounders used to dub the products of their rivals. “No, the Britishers didn’t send it over by freight, but by express, the charges not being prepaid, if they should ask you,” remarks an American exchange. “Had it not been refurbished, Travis might have been accused of cooking in it with canned heat, or having put it in soak at some uncle s.’ it may be remarked the British Simon-pure specimen of the silversmith’s art is no such commuter on the ocean ferry as the British Open Cup, which since the war has been on the bounding billow as often as a foreign buyer for a department store. The customs collectors have come to know the open tankard as well as they do the captains of the big liners and bowing to it like an old mality „ railroad al °ng without for-